Working With Tiger Technologies

Juanvaldes writes "Apple has put online more developer-oriented information about Tiger. There are also detailed articles about Spotlight, Dashboard, 64-bit apps and Automator."

Re:Automater shows promise

[dr.badass]

the ability to build event scripts with XML and/or HTML sounds freakin' awesome.

I think you're mistaken. Dashboard widgets are written in HTML+JavaScript. Automator actions are written in AppleScript or Objective-C.

It's basically built on top of AppleScript, so you won't be able to do anything that can't already be done with AppleScript. Apps or functions that aren't scriptable will be inaccessable to Automator.

On the other hand, I think developers will be more prone to add scripting support now that scripting is more accessable to users, and not the pain in the ass that AppleScript typically is.

Re:New Apple User

[quasipunk guy]

They date back to the original development of the Macintosh. That is, they predate everything outside of Xerox PARC.

TwinTurbo?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Apple first showed Spotlight last June, and if you look at it you will see that it is really an extension of an old Copland technology (the project that was started to originally replace System 7.5) that came out in System 8.6 under the TwinTurbo codename (text summarizing and indexing of the hard drive)." TwinTurbo? I thought it was V-Twin. http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/movabletype/arc hives/000179.html [stevenberlinjohnson.com]

Autovectorization?

[Paladeen]

This stuff looks pretty nifty:

Along with improvements to the GUI, Xcode 2.0 will ship with GCC 4.0 which features a new C++ Parser and several code generation improvements including auto-vectorization. While hand-tuning Velocity Engine code can get you the maximum performance from the G4 and G5 processors, now you can have GCC do the heavy lifting for you. You'll benefit from this without any extra effort, with auto-vectorization in GCC bringing anywhere between a 4X and 14X performance improvement to code that works with arrays of data.

AltiVec support without having to write any optimized code...sounds like a winner to me.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:No Python with Dashboard?

[sylencer]

The important part is Any UNIX command or script, the remainder are just examples. Look at the code snippet right below it, there is a standard system call, executing a command.

No problem with calling a Python script from that.

Re:New Apple User

[dobber]

I wasn't following the Mac world in the Copland days, but I do believe Apple now employs Dominic Giampaolo, who implemented the Be File System of BeOS. BFS contained a lot of what Spotlight looks to be. All the basics where there, although I think Spotlight has some different implementation decisions as they didn't rewrite the file system from scratch.

I've been waiting for something like this ever since I heard they picked up Dominic. BFS was amazing. Live queries on all your data, and ever so quick. I especially liked creating virtual folders for my email -- they were just persistent queries on the file system.

Anyone interested should check out Dominic's book Practical File System Design with the Be File System [amazon.com] it's a great read.

Re:New Apple User

[dobber]

Oops, just checked and found Dominic's homepage [nobius.org]. He is on the Spotlight team, and his book is now available as a PDF [nobius.org].

Re:SQLite part of OS...

[ZackSchil]

According to the article's link, it does both. I quote:

In Tiger, Cocoa can manage your data objects themselves through the power of Core Data, providing automatic undo/redo support, additional user interface synchronization, and data consistency, correctness, and speed enhancements when it's time to write to disk.

Core Data gives you the ability to create a description of your data objects. Once defined, Core Data handles most of the heavy work of managing your data objects, both in-memory and on-disk. This allows you to focus on application logic and avoid the infrastructure work. In short, Core Data is a model-driven object management graph and persistence framework.

In Tiger, Core Data will support three different kinds of files for storage of data:

A text-based XML file format

A better performing binary file format

A high-performance, SQLite-based database file format

Each of these file formats has its strengths. The XML file format is a good choice during the development of an application as it allows you to peek inside the file and see what is going on. The SQLite format will often be the best choice for desktop applications because of its performance characteristics.

Re:New Apple User

[dynamo]

Quicksilver is pretty bad-ass. You forgot to include a link [blacktree.com], though.